


feels like we are falling awake

by sixtywattgloom



Category: Fifth Harmony (Band)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-16
Updated: 2014-07-16
Packaged: 2018-02-09 04:33:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1969212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sixtywattgloom/pseuds/sixtywattgloom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>She’s not even sure how long they stay like that: Dinah’s hands over Camila’s hands, keeping her close to the rhythm of her body.</i> dinah takes camila out clubbing, and it is everything camila expects and then everything she doesn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	feels like we are falling awake

**Author's Note:**

> i'm not super crazy about this, but i want to actually pretend i can finish things, so here's a thing! also, there isn't enough caminah in the world, so hopefully you find this bearable; as always, i'd love to know what you thought.

The music is so deafening that she shouldn’t be able to think about anything else, but thinking seems to be the only thing she can’t stop doing.

She _wants_ to stop standing still, she _wants_ to stop having the least amount of rhythm in the history of mankind, but instead she’s pressed back against the corner of a counter and uncomfortably hot with the press of bodies all around her and she can’t stop thinking about how she must look.

She also knows that the only reason Dinah’s still within a ten foot radius is because of her, and Camila can’t stop feeling guilty about that. At least she seems to be having fun—she’s sandwiched between a couple dudes who are hot without beer goggles, and she’s not having any problem with a sense of rhythm.

Camila watches them for several long moments: the way dude 1 moves his hips against her, the way dude 2 slides his hand along her waist and leans down so his mouth’s against her neck (Camila’s not entirely sure if his attempts count as kissing or not—maybe kissing rules are different in clubs. Which, like, Camila hasn’t exactly achieved a kissing expert degree either way, but it sort of reminds her of coming home to her enthusiastic dog. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. She likes her dog).

Regardless, in the center there’s Dinah, and Dinah makes her partners look about as talented as Camila—with no effort at all. It’s not something Camila can pinpoint, exactly: it’s the steady sway of her hips and it’s not, it’s the way her feet move beneath her and it’s not. It’s like an _energy_ , a force that draws people to her and overcomes them all at the same time. Camila doesn’t have to look around to know that Dinah’s better at this than anyone else here.

She doesn’t realize she’s still staring until Dinah looks up suddenly and catches her gaze, and then Camila’s looking away and flushing pink before she even registers her embarrassment. It’s just that it feels private, somehow, watching her best friend dance with two guys who would kill to take her home tonight. It feels like she’s intruding, and she’s struck by how much she really, really doesn’t want to be here.

“Milaaaa,” comes a voice so close to her ear it makes her jump, and it’s only Dinah’s hand at her wrist that keeps her from falling over. Fifteen years into a best friendship and she’s gotten used to keeping Camila from dying—which probably makes up for this irrational need to take her to cool places inhabited by cool people, but whatever. “You’re not having fun.”

“What? I’m having so much fun—this is, like, crazy fun! Me and the corner are getting along super well. Just between you and me, I think this is the beginning of a happily ever after,” she yells into Dinah’s ear.

It works at least a little, because it makes Dinah laugh and grab at her hand and Camila didn’t _mean_ to make her stay longer, but she doesn’t totally hate it either. “C’mon,” Dinah insists, “dance with me.”

Camila makes a noise of protest. “You know I can’t.”

“We do it together all the time!” Dinah says, like their 3 a.m. dance parties actually count for anything in a place like this 

“I don’t think. we’re looking at a bunch of sprinkler fans here,” she points out.

“You can do it,” Dinah says. “I’ll show you.”

It’s nice of Dinah to be so optimistic about her dancing potential, but Camila’s also very sure it’s unfounded; nevertheless, she shrugs and Dinah smiles wide, reaching forward to rest her hands on either side of her hips and direct her movements.

“Like that!” Dinah says, encouragingly. “But looser, like—”

Hands still on Camila, she crosses what little space remains between them until their bodies are pressed flush against each other—presumably so that she can feel the difference, the looseness, up close and personal. And it’s not like they’ve never been this close before—they have, a lot, because Camila asks Dinah to give her piggyback rides about 85% of the time they have to go places, and because they’ve fallen asleep cuddling more than a handful of times, and because they’re _best friends_ —but Camila’s not sure anyone could be ready for the things that Dinah can do with her hips. 

“There,” Dinah says brightly. Camila thinks maybe she manages an “um” in response, but that might be wishful thing.

“You’re gonna kill ‘em,” Dinah says, earnest, and Camila doesn’t protest when she drags her into the crowd, away from the safety of the counter of her dreams.

“You don’t have to stay,” Camila says. “Am I keeping you from making out with hot guys? With, like—abs?” While one night stands might not have been Dinah’s thing, casual buzzed making out has always been well within her repertoire. Which makes Camila the worst wing woman of all time.

Dinah laughs, and it reaches the dimples by the corner of her eyes, and Camila feels a little more okay. “I’ve seen better.”

But okay only lasts so long, especially when Dinah starts dancing—hips pressed to Camila’s, breath hot against Camila’s mouth, hands sliding along Camila’s waist, tracing over the hem of her skirt. And Camila doesn’t know what to do about it.

She keeps not knowing what to do about it when Dinah spins around to face away from her, or when Dinah grabs her hands to pull them onto her hips, or when Dinah leans all the way back into her. She’s not even sure how long they stay like that: Dinah’s hands over Camila’s hands, keeping her close to the rhythm of her body. But she’s even less clear about the state of her own body—where her brain picks up every shift of Dinah’s hips immediately, Camila’s about 98% sure she’s standing stock still in the middle of everything. All she feels is a little breathless and a lot out of control—and Dinah, absolutely everywhere.

Mostly, she’s acutely aware that this is what the dude sandwich must have felt while they gathered around her: overwhelmed and completely out of their depth, like makeshift rowboats caught in the middle of a tidal wave—but like they wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. Like their best friend in the world suddenly also became this person whose body they couldn’t stop being aware of, whose mouth—

Wait. No. Maybe the last one’s sort of a projection.

“I told you you had it,” Dinah says, turning back around, mouth hardly brushing Camila’s ear. She’s warm everywhere—of course, there are people everywhere, she reasons, no matter how much she’s stopped thinking about them—and her hands are still on Dinah’s waist, and she decides she’s never loved three a.m. dance parties so much. Three a.m. dance parties are safe. Three a.m. dance parties are not Dinah’s hips doing things against Camila’s hips, and three a.m. dance parties aren’t noses brushing and sharing the same breaths, and—

Well. Sometimes they’re the second, and sometimes also the third, but those were at times when Camila felt like a normal person. Right now, where her whole body feels like it’s vibrating, where her hands and her brain and her mouth feel disconnected, like they’ve been split up into separate pieces with all of their own separate agendas, doesn’t feel normal.

“I don’t—I don’t know, me and the counter had a real rapport, I’m not sure anything could match,” Camila manages. “I haven’t been doing much, anyway. You’ve kinda been—you know.”

“You have!” Dinah insists. “Look, you’re loose.”

Camila doesn’t know how that could possibly be true. Every part of her feels coiled tight, except for the shotgun explosions happening on the inside of her chest that she realizes a minute later are probably supposed to be heartbeats.

Dinah might be a little bit drunk, but Camila hasn’t had anything at all. And that’s a lot scarier.

She also really wishes she was wearing something that wasn’t the crop top Dinah insisted looked “hella vela,” because Dinah’s fingers against the bare skin of her waist make her wonder if this is what all the stories mean when they talk about forgetting your own name. 

Or maybe it’s more like what her third grade teacher meant that time Camila wrote a story about a dying crayon and he told her parents that she had a “unique mind. 

“You’re hot,” Camila says, only she’s pretty sure that’s not what she meant. “Wait, I’m hot—it’s hot. In here. There are a lot of people. You’re hot, too.”

Dinah laughs and flips her hair and leans in enough that their cheeks are pressed together. Camila wonders vaguely if it burns Dinah, too. “You’re hot too, Oala.”

Camila doesn’t mean to say it, but she’s nervous and warm and it happens by accident: “If we don’t get out of here right now, I think I’m gonna kiss you, so maybe we should…” She attempts a vague gesture toward the door. 

“Do you wanna kiss me?”

If this was a movie, everything would probably stop. Maybe there’d be a slow-mo effect with nothing but the steady beat of a heart as its soundtrack. But nothing stops—it all happens at once, the thrumming of the music and the shotgun thudding in her ears and the bodies knocking against her sides and the girl in front of her with brown eyes and dimples at the corners and her head so close that some of her hair is mixed with some of Camila’s hair, and— 

“I…yeah.” 

The next thing she knows Dinah’s grabbing her hand and dragging her through the crowd, and Camila doesn’t know what that means. But she does know Dinah didn’t abandon her in the middle of an ocean of people, so that has to be a little bit of a positive, right? She isn’t completely losing her best friend in the world. There are worse mistakes than saying you want to kiss someone, aren’t there? There have to be. Like—murdering their family, or whatever.

But Dinah doesn’t say anything when they’re finally outside and the air is breathable again. She keeps holding onto Camila’s hand and not saying anything when she takes a right turn at the end of the street, and she keeps not saying anything ten minutes later when they’ve reached the outskirts of campus, or five minutes after that, at the steps of the humanities building where they finally pause. 

It’s not Dinah of her at all. Camila almost makes a joke about how they haven’t even taken one selfie yet tonight, but there’s this weight in the bottom of her stomach like everything’s about to come crashing down around her, and she can’t remember the words.

Dinah must notice Camila’s confusion, because she finally breaks her fifteen minute-long silence. “You know, ’cause here’s where you said you were excited for college, loser. Like, maybe adult life wasn’t gonna totally kill you, and I said—”

“I was gonna be better than everyone at it,” Camila finishes, brows furrowed.

“Yeah!” Dinah says, and her smile shines like Camila’s given her something, somehow.

“But—why are we here, now? At two a.m.? When we were just at a club and then you stopped talking and now you’re talking to me again, which is cool, but what…?" 

“It’d be stupid for us to kiss somewhere you don’t like,” Dinah says, like it’s maybe the most obvious thing in the world, like how can Camila do differential equations and not _know_. But Camila feels fifteen steps behind and like she’s trying to make sense out of all of the syllables that just came out of Dinah’s mouth, form them into words that could actually happen in this universe. “And you liked when we were here.”

It’s Camila’s body that reacts twenty times faster than her brain, Camila’s body that takes the half-step necessary to erase the little distance between them. She’s kissed people before—two is the barest minimum for a plural, but it’s still a plural—but she’s never kissed her best friend on the mouth, and her best friend has never kissed her back.

It feels like a first and not like a first at all.

It feels like all the times Dinah pulled back the sheets and Camila buried against her side and Dinah slid their legs together to keep her warm. It feels like holding hands in the limo after prom with Dinah half-asleep and still a little drunk in Camila’s lap, giggling at everything. It feels like Camila’s first heartbreak, when she stayed at Dinah’s house for a week because that was the only thing that could make her feel like a normal person.

“I want to kiss you again,” Camila says, almost as soon as it’s over, and Dinah’s fingertips brush Camila’s cheek and they kiss like it’s something they’ve never not wanted to do.

“I don’t completely hate clubs,” Camila admits when they finally separate. “I don’t hate us at clubs.”

Dinah pulls back to strike a pose, hand on her hip. “You think you can handle this?”

“Not a chance,” Camila says, even though Dinah’s already dissolved into laughter. She’s spent fifteen years being too hot for Camila, but she also hasn’t let go of her hand for at least thirty minutes.

Dinah kisses her again, and maybe it’s just because she can, and maybe it reminds Camila of second grade, of Dinah reaching under Camila’s desk during lectures about even and odd numbers to grab her hand and hold it.   

Of sixth grade, of Dinah resting her hand on Camila’s knee during lessons about the rate and likelihood of volcanic eruptions and Camila intertwining their fingers.

Of ninth grade, of presenting _Romeo & Juliet _together, of Dinah reaching behind Camila’s back for her trembling hand. Steadying.

Maybe the only difference is that at eighteen they’ve forgotten how to let go.


End file.
